Modernism Japanese style: The Cleveland Museum of Art offers a fresh take on the 20th century in "Remaking Tradition"

Without fanfare, the Cleveland Museum of Art is slowly and quietly outgrowing its frosty ambivalence toward 20th century art. And it’s doing so at the moment with an unusual Asian twist.

The latest sign of a thaw is the museum’s major spring exhibition, “Remaking Tradition: Modern Art of Japan From the Tokyo National Museum.”

With 55 examples of painting, sculpture, ceramics, tapestries and calligraphy, “Remaking Tradition” charts Japan’s artistic development from the 1870s to the 1930s.

The show illuminates the rise of modernism from a perspective that will be completely and utterly new to most viewers, which is terrific. It also draws fresh connections to the formidable permanent collections in Asian art, formed largely by the Cleveland museum’s great director from 1958 to 1983, Sherman E. Lee.

At the same time, it’s hard to look at the show without also considering how it also reflects historical weaknesses at the museum. By traveling halfway around the world to tell the story of modernism, the exhibition subtly calls attention to the museum’s longstanding coolness to European and American developments of the same period.

Thanks in large part to conservative artistic prejudices among members of the museum’s board of trustees from the 1940s into the early 1990s, the museum generally gave short shrift to the 20th century’s major movements while they area actually happening.

Exhibitions on modern and contemporary art of the time were rare – apart from the annual May Show on art from Northeast Ohio. The museum began collecting in the area late, and did so with a medicinal, unenthusiastic approach, apart from a strong focus on Pablo Picasso championed by Lee and by Ed Henning, then the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art.

Over the past 20 years, the museum has addressed the problem by filling gaps in its permanent collection, and by organizing important shows on Picasso, modernism in Barcelona and the Mexican muralista, Diego Rivera.

It has also created two curatorial posts in contemporary art and has given modern and contemporary art significant square footage in its new East Wing galleries. But its collection still has major gaps, and the museum has yet to explore much of the core Western art of the 20th century on a consistent and committed basis in special exhibitions, whether organized internally or borrowed from other institutions.

“Remaking Tradition” demonstrates the museum’s willingness to open the door a bit, especially in areas where it has strong work to trade for loans from other museums. And that means Asia.

The Japanese exhibition is part of an exchange between Cleveland and the Tokyo National Museum, the show’s only lender. While Tokyo’s modern art treasures are visiting us, the Cleveland museum has sent Tokyo selections from the great Japanese collections assembled by Lee.

View full sizeSoyama Sachihiko's "Aiming at the Target," 1890, portrays a samurai archer in a style that echoes conservative Western techniques of the day.Tokyo National Museum

The show is part of an emerging trend at the museum. It follows a groundbreaking 2011 exhibition on the art of Fu Baoshi, a 20th-century Chinese painter who balanced traditional ink-and-brush painting with pro-Maoist messages during and after China's Communist Revolution.

The museum says that "Remaking Tradition" marks the first time such a large and high-quality collection of modern Japanese art “has ever been displayed outside of Japan,” which makes it, like the Fu exhibition, a bit of a coup.

The exhibition charts the seismic shifts in Japanese culture that followed Commodore Matthew Perry’s naval expeditions in 1853 and 1854 in which the United States forcibly opened Japan to broad trade with the West. Following this shock, the feudal Tokugawa shoguns restored power to the Meiji emperor, who led a wave of industrial and cultural modernization.

Japan then defeated China and Russia in wars in 1894-95 and 1904-05, over which country would dominate the Korean peninsula.

Japan’s victories made it Asia’s first imperial power. Ultimately, its ambitions led it to invade China in 1937 and to trigger America’s entry into World War II with the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Japanese artists wrestled over how to respond to their country’s turbulent rise to power and its imperial aspirations. Should they emulate Western artists? Or should they dive deeper into Japanese tradition, making it bolder and even more vibrant?

The answer, as “Remaking Tradition” establishes, was both. The exhibition oscillates between confident expressions of nationalist identity and efforts at imitating the West.

One example of the latter approach is Kuroda Seiki’s pleasant but unexceptional 1893 “Dancing Lady Maiko Girl,” a French Impressionist-style painting in oil on canvas of an apprentice geisha – an aspiring courtesan or female entertainer.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is Kikuchi Yosai’s 1847 “Mongolian Invasion of Japan,” which depicts in a traditional ink-and-brush style a catastrophic storm that shattered a 1274 Mongolian invasion. In a 19th-century context, such images expressed a powerful sense of national pride and a desire to shut the door to the outside world.

Exhibition Review

Venue: Cleveland Museum of Art

What: "Remaking Tradition: Modern Art of Japan from the Tokyo National Museum."

Where: 11150 East Blvd.

When: Through Sunday, May 11.

Admission: $20. Call 216-421-7350 or go to www.clevelandart.org.

While some Japanese artists emulated Westerners and some burrowed into tradition, others found a third way. They distilled the essences of Japanese style in a manner that paralleled the search for simplification and visual power among Western artists of the time – but without making a revolutionary break with their own past.

One pair of screens focuses on a stunning image of the blue volcanic cone of Mount Fuji rising above a sea of white clouds into a gold-leaf sky. The other depicts a servant sleeping in the shade of a tranquil grove of willows that flanks a winding blue stream.

These magical paintings are masterpieces of minimalist abbreviation that coincide with contemporary developments in the West. Yet they also intensify the pictorially flat and frontal boldness of traditional Japanese painting style.

Interestingly, Taikan’s paintings date from the exact year as the pivotal Armory Show in New York, which introduced European Cubism and abstract art to America.

Japanese artists were intensely aware of the artistic revolutions of the day in the West. And, in a deep way, they actually contributed to them. When trade with Japan began to flourish in the 1860s, Paris was flooded with cheap and beautiful Japanese woodblock prints, whose bold, visually flat designs had a huge impact on the French Impressionists and post-Impressionists.

The Cleveland museum calls attention to Japan’s far-reaching artistic influence in the pre-modern era with its other important exhibition this spring, which focuses on Vincent van Gogh’s “repetitions,” his multiple versions of favorite motifs.

Van Gogh was one of many artists working in France in the late 19th century who were drenched in the fervent Japonisme that literally shaped the course of Western modern art.

If there’s a conclusion to be drawn from “Remaking Tradition” about the Japanese side of the story, it is that there was no revolutionary counterpart in Japan to van Gogh.

Instead, there was Soyama Sachihiko, whose 1890 oil painting of an archer in traditional samurai garb shows a dry, workmanlike understanding of Western-style academic painting of the day.

And there was Takamura Shinpu, whose realistic, 1909 painting of travelers in traditional Japanese garb dozing in a dimly lighted train station at night offers a faint echo of the Western-style urban realism.

You could think of Shinpu as an incipient Japanese Edward Hopper. Yet both his painting and the Sachihiko feel as if they were made in the artist’s second languages, not their mother tongue. They mastered the basics of Western style, but not in the revolutionary way in which van Gogh absorbed Japanese style.

Artists who, like Taikan, managed to intensify Japanese traditions in a fresh way fared better. The Cleveland installation of “Remaking Tradition” telegraphs this message by placing a 1935 masterpiece by Matsubayashi Keigetsu on a wall where it functions as a climactic statement.

View full sizeA large detail of Matsubayashi Keigetsu's "Spring Colors along the Mountain Stream," a masterpiece of Japanese style in "Remaking Tradition," on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art.Tokyo National Museum

Entitled “Spring Colors Along the Mountain Stream,” the work is a stunning landscape painting, brushed in vivid colors on a pair of six-fold screens with a telescopic sense of compressed visual energy and hallucinatory power. The Sachihiko and Shinpu paintings come nowhere near Keigetsu’s intensity.

If there’s a caveat about such observations, it is that most if not all the works in “Remaking Japan” were government-sponsored or chosen by the government to promote Japan in a series of global expositions around the world from the 1870s to the 1930s.

As such, they represent official, if not royal, patronage of the fine arts – not a complete overview of Japanese art during the period. The show omits graphic design, architecture, photography and the popular woodblock prints that had such a huge impact on Western artists of the time.

But the show has some very high moments, and will add to anyone’s understanding of the 20th century. If that also means the Cleveland Museum of Art is finally getting serious about framing its own perspective on modernism, so much the better.

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